The celebratory finale of the later intermedi, with its back-and-forth between
chorus and soloists mirrored by the dancers’ patterns was a delight, writes Ivan
Hewett.

What did it take to make a royal wedding party in Renaissance Italy go with a swing? An awful lot, if the nuptials of Ferdinando, Grand Duke of Tuscany and Christina of Lorraine in October 1589 are anything to go by. There were lavish theatricals with gods mounted on flying machines, a smoking Hell with demons, a singing competition (won by the Muses), and a poet rescued from the sea by dolphins – all accompanied by gloriously euphonious music. And these were just the interludes in the main event, a spoken comedy.

It’s those interludes, or intermedi, that have gone down in history as a forerunner of the earliest operas. A historically accurate recreation would bankrupt even a rich festival, and the Brighton Early Music Festival certainly isn’t that, so it went for clever suggestiveness.

The venue was St Bartholomew’s Church, which is hardly the Uffizi Theatre of the original wedding. But its dark and lofty spaces gave ample scope for coloured lighting effects. Imagery of Renaissance gardens and seascapes were projected on to a gauze curtain behind the orchestra, through which one could see the soloists and the two choruses. The most spectacular element was the three dancers of Zu Aerial Dance. One of these, clad in green, played the monstrous python of the third intermedio. Her snaking down on a rope was imperiously halted by a white-clad Apollo.

All this action was accompanied by a myriad choral and solo songs, and delightful music from the lavish 30-strong band, including a gorgeously solemn Flemish motet arranged for reedy Renaissance bass instruments. This accompanied the scene in Hell (enlivened by masked chorus members in the aisles, gibbering not very scarily). Equally striking was the trio of female hamadryads (wood nymphs) who trilled away in the second intermedio.

The pacing in the first half was sluggish but thankfully things picked up in the later intermedi, and the celebratory finale, with its back-and-forth between chorus and soloists mirrored by the dancers’ patterns – two swinging on ropes above the altar – was a delight.